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Welcome to the first of the Connector Series. This first one focuses completely on the Hinge Connector (And some motors). We will walk through creating a dynamic briefcase, a toy snake, and a walking robot. Chris had some fun and push the walking robot to do battle to the death verses it’s twin. Enjoy!

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72 Comments

Chris Schmidt

Ha. Completely unrelated, but a pretty good coincidence! BTW, the old hydraulic arm tutorial could get you a long way to doing that drum animation you mentioned, just make it a more simple arm, and copy it a bunch of times!

Mr.P

Haha, you’re one crazy dude Chris! Thank you very much for the tutorial, although I would suggest you talked slower when hitting shortcuts and definitely when doing the extrude things (but to your defense, I know this wasn’t a tutorial on that!)

Devin Sloan

DjP

Brilliant Chris, as always,
Laughing so much at the end, i need to rewatch.. your primitives and dynamics education is incredibly important for both myself and many others..
I know last time you mentioned the struggle with original ideas to discuss but this is an absolute treasure.
Look at the mathematical power involved..things certainly have moved along..

doubleseven

Ian

If only every tutorial was as much fun as this instead of the stuffy technically perfect renditions I normally find!
Chris, you’re a master at modelling and you made me laugh out loud tonight. The ROBOTS OF DEATH are awesome!
Thank you so much.

Miguel

Andrei

Well started like…. here is a connector a snake or something…. booooooriiii……. WHAT??? Robots of Death dammm where did that came from. COOOOL tutorial and fuuuuuuun.

I was wondering if a “helicopter” (more like a propeller and a box) can be made to take off only by using dynamics. I am not into dynamics i do not know if there is a air friction option in there but i will try to make a Chopper Of Death to defeat the Robot of Death. That is my goal now.

Yeah !
It seems that the Robots Of Death’s battle is a great feature in your tutorial ! I thought GSG can organize a huge battle of virtual robots contest here and now (mostly like the 5 seconds projects), isn’t it ?
Great and interesting tutorial, as usual… Can’t wait for the next episodes around the connectors…
By the way, are you planning a part 2 of our TP’s tutorial ?
Give us more fun with C4D !

Gokhan

Anonymustafa

I had to laugh at the end… the robot fight was just hilarious, but i liked the animation. the dynanims look very convincing, i appreciate the tutorial. i will definetly try it out and render some stuff.. would like to see things, what others came up with!

I used a cloner object to place each slat of the tread into a nice rounded rectangle shape. Then I converted the Cloner into an Object. I made a hinge for every slat and made the hinge a child of the slat. That way I was easily able to zero out the position of the hinge and offset it so it would be in-between two slats. Connected the hinges/slats. Then added some motors to the wheels and fixed their position.

The tread intially drooped a lot at first. So I pushed my wheels past the treads just a little bit, making them intersect space. When the dynamics ran it popped the treads over the wheels to make them nice and taut.

touchsky

What about GSG virtual robot championship? Consisting of Qualifying Round, winners go to playoff, 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, semifinal , and… GREAT DEATH FINAL!!! ) Crhis will make simple robot ring,and will set up technical uspects, Nick will setup render, introduce every robot, make animation render. May be only rules – size of the robot should be like default cube, users will upload links to they model of robot with name.. I think will be great fun competition.

Kutaputa

LOVE IT….
And don’t worry about rushing long tuts don’t bother me.
just wondering if you could go over a bit more of the Mass options under Dynamics
Like the center of mass
not really sure how to use that it does not seem to change any thing for me

Carl

I was just wondering if there is a way to add friction to those hinges. I am creating a bicycle chain using your ‘snake toy’ technique. The chain only has to drop whilst staying connected to the main sprocket (I do this by turning dynamics off for those links). It doesn’t actually has to be functional. But the whole chain seems to stretch a lot and flexes way too much! Therefore I would like to increase the friction between the individual links. I am not near as familiar with all the settings as you are but I can’t seem to fix it.

Tjaopapa

Lonnie Busch

Alan A.

One thing I still don’t understand on the snake thing : why only the first hinge need to be a child of a “segment”. I can’t find the logic behind that behaviour :

On your first try on animating the snake, you only animate the first segment, but the first hinge is not linked to it, so it just doesn’t move, and so does the whole snake.
Making this hinge a child of the first segment, corrects it. I get that.
But then, even if the first hinge follows the first segment, why does the 2nd Hinge follow the 2nd segments ? It’s not linked in any way to any object… Can’t get that ^^

Answers and Explanations are welcomed ^^
I don’t mind assuming that “the first hinge is enough”, but I want to understand why.

Cinephile

Guy Hall

This is the craziest/funniest/most enjoyable tutorial I have ever done, I’ve been fiddling around with my “robots” for 8 hours (2:30am in the UK now)!!! I may just attempt to attach a dynamic “Link Chain Of Death” to my duelling robots before I try and get some sleep before work Cheers for such an excellent tutorial Chris.

Guilherme Mello

Chris Luehning

Jam Sajid

i watched the tutorials they are awesome and very well designed for the learning purposes you have created these tutorials with well and good animations i have learned many new things from these tutorials you should keep on creating stuff like this it will be very well and good if you provide some more references for this topic!
again thank you for your remarkable genuine effort!

Alexandr

I have a problem with starting motors. I want to start them not at the begging of the scene but after 100th frame. But even if motors Angular Target Speed and Targue above 1000 the motors doesn`t starts. In opposite if I starts motors before 60th frame – they begin to rotate wheels. The same situation when I stop motors ( Angular Target Speed turned down to 0) during the animation: the car drove for 100frames, than I stop the motor for 200frames and after that they don`t begin to rotate even if Angular Target Speed and Targue are turned up to 1000 or more)

German Cebrian

Comment Rules

This is a friendly community. Please treat everyone with respect. We don't all have to agree, but we do have to be nice. Criticism is fine, but rude comments and name calling will be deleted. Use your real name and don't be spammy. Thanks for adding to the conversation.

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